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Colossus 3.5-in SSD Combines Quad Controllers
Vigile writes "The new Colossus SSD comes in capacities starting at 256GB and going all the way up to 1TB in a standard 3.5-in hard drive form factor. This larger size was required because the drive actually integrates not one but four Indilinx SSD controllers and three total RAID controllers in a nested RAID-0 array. All of this goodness combines to create an incredibly fast drive that beats most other options in terms of write speeds and is competitive in read tests as well. Using some custom 'garbage collection' firmware, the drive works around the fact that TRIM commands aren't supported in RAID configurations to maintain high speeds through the life of the SSD."
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Really, if you want to spend that kind of money, put it on a card. It would be much faster on the PCI buss that SATA for a negligible incremental cost.
128 GB $549.99
256 GB $1,014.99
512 GB $1,599.99
1024 GB $3,315.99
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of storage in this country. The Intel X-25 was the SSD to own. Then the other guy came out with a three-controller drive. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the X-25E. That's three controllers and an extra port. For USB. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards went to four controllers. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three controllers and a cache. USB or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to five controllers.
I thought it was pretty clear that what matters for most desktop users is the random small write speed. See, for example, Anandtech's SSD anthology and later followups.
So, where are the 4 KiB random write benchmarks? They are conspicuously absent from this review. We can see the effect, I think, in the IOMeter results -- the X-25M outperforms the OCZ drive across the board on those, despite the OCZ win in the throughput tests. But, personally, I'd like to see the raw numbers on 4 KiB random writes. Have this many reviewers really learned so little about benchmarking SSDs since they came out?
People think all SSDs are the same. They aren't. Consumer SSDs are typically MLC and have a failure rate far above "enterprise" SSDs which are SLC. I wish you could buy consumer SLC SSDs
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This kludgey design is a bad idea for several reasons :
1. Despite throwing the kitchen sink at the problem, those indilinx chips are still much slower than Intel's controller at small, random reads and writes.
2. Since the drive needs four indilinx controllers rather than 1, some complex packaging, AND 3 RAID controllers it's going to cost a lot more per gigabyte. It's probably also more failure prone. And the MSRPs bear that out : this is a lot more expensive than the MSRPs for the equivalent Intel product.
3. Doesn't support native TRIM support
4. Biggest problem of all : the drive is bandwidth starved because it's on the SATA bus rather than on the PCI express bus. Furthermore, those slow internal RAID chips don't help matters. So instead of supporting sequential reads at 600 megabytes/second, it's capped at about 240. Lame.
It comes with a Collosus of a price tag :)
and the companies ( Hello, Samsung!) should be ashamed. It wasn't until a few years ago that MLC was commercially viable but it only increases
by a factor of TWO. That's one of the lowest, most pointless tradeoffs ever in recent computing.
So, I get merely TWICE the storage for a TEN TIMES reduction in average component life, a 40% reduction in write speed, without fancy controller
redesign, and we get to enjoy all the ludicrous "benefits" of MLC for the price that SLC would have been anyway, through market forces and silicon die shrink
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
It would, but don't do it with that one or you'll fry either the board. They rewired the internal connectors so they could pass 2 channels over a single SATA connector. The SATA data lines passed via the power connector IIRC, so yeah, don't do it :).
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=821&type=expert
Allyn Malventano
Storage Editor, PC Perspective
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